Many of Oculus’s Early Backers Not Part of Facebook Riches

The big winners of Facebook’s $2 billion deal to buy Oculus VR, a virtual reality headset maker, include a roster of elite venture capitalists who invested in the company early on.

But many who supported Oculus in its early days will walk away empty-handed.

Those would be its backers on Kickstarter, the fund-raising platform that Oculus used to raise $2.4 million in September 2012. That money helped the company develop its Oculus Rift headset for video games.

Kickstarter backers, due to the nature of the platform, would not have been expecting a big payday anyway. Their goal was not to receive equity but rather to see the product come to market. The smallest backers got merely a “thank you.” Larger backers were promised early prototypes of the headset itself.

Still, not all of Oculus’s backers on Kickstarter were happy with the Facebook acquisition. Markus Persson, for one, took to his blog to complain that he did not trust the social networking giant.

“I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition,” he wrote.

But the deal does reaffirm the power of Kickstarter to bring attention and money to new ideas. Another Kickstarter project, Pebble, a smartwatch, raised more than $10 million on the fund-raising platform and went on to attract venture capital.

In the case of Oculus, venture capitalists swooped in less than a year after the completion of the Kickstarter campaign.

In June 2013, the company raised a $16 million financing round led by Spark Capital and Matrix Partners. “I have a boss now, I guess,” Brendan Iribe, who started the company with Palmer Luckey and others, told The Verge at the time.

By the end of 2013, Oculus was signing another venture capital deal. Andreessen Horowitz led a $75 million investment round, with participation from the company’s earlier investors. Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, two partners at Andreessen Horowitz, joined the start-up’s board.

In that investment round, the company was valued at roughly $250 million, Wired reported at the time.

“Facebook’s support will dramatically accelerate the development of the virtual reality ecosystem,” Mr. Dixon wrote in a blog post on Tuesday, after the Facebook deal was announced. “While we are sad to no longer be working with Oculus, we are very happy to see virtual reality receive the support it deserves.”